Workgroup
A workgroup determines the behaviour and semantics of matters in ContactsLaw.
Workgroups are used to categorise matters based on their area of law (e.g. Litigation), or a specific service offered by a business (e.g. Demand Letters). They are hierarchical, allowing child workgroups to inherit semantics from their parent workgroup, while also defining their own characteristics.
A workgroup is required to create a matter; therefore, every subscription will include at least one workgroup.
Properties
Workgroups have the following properties:
- Name
- Allowed matter types - Used to restrict the creation of certain types of matters.
- Whether to manually commence matters; i.e. do not transition to the Commenced state automatically.
- Content specification for matter descriptions
- Definitions for:
- Members
- Parties
- Judicial officers
- Custom fields
- Checklist items
Matter Descriptions
The content specification for matter descriptions can contain a mixture of formatted text (Markdown) and expressions.
Assets corresponding to the matter, parties and fields are automatically defined for use within expressions. The naming convention for these assets is so-called "Pascal Case", where spaces and punctuation are removed from the names of roles/fields. For example, a role named "Seller's agent" would be exposed as SellersAgent. A list of the available assets is displayed in the workgroup editor in the Desktop App.
Owned Items
The following items can only be created at the workgroup level:
The following items can be created at the workgroup level, as well as other levels:
- Disbursement types
- Documents (precedents)
- Document types
- Policies
- Processes
Security
A subset of the available permissions can be set for each workgroup. If not set, the workgroup inherits its permissions from the business.
Deletion
A workgroup that was created accidentally can be deleted at any time. A workgroup cannot be deleted once any substantial work has been performed within it.